One theory I heard (cite needed) was that more women attend college, there are better and more colleges on the East Coast, and people tend to live where they went to college. Though this theory has the smell of truthiness, rather than truth.

For whatever reason, this is the first thing that came to me: men flock to places where they think they’ll find attractive women (beach and ski bunnies) and women flock to places where they think they’ll find high-earning men. However, that doesn’t explain the entire middle of the country.

I bet the college explanation explains at least part of the variance…It’d help if the dots were in terms of ratios rather than absolute differences. Makes it hard to distinguish city size effects from actual gender disparities.

Seriously, have the other commenters here never BEEN to California, Texas, or Florida and seen how many immigrants there are there? You can’t sneeze without a booger landing on an immigrant, and most of them are male for obvious reasons.